Usually because the people they are talking to are trembling and sore afraid. When engaged in an angelic or holy interaction, try to be like Samuel was, because it's hard to process new information whilst shitting one's pants.
I never quite thought of it from that perspective. As a retired person the pandemic lockdowns didn't impact my income or my working situation, obviously. I did, however, rail at the lockdowns and took every opportunity I could find to get out and defy what the ruling class was telling me to do. Maybe it was the rebel in me, or maybe it was just the common sense of having been around for six plus decades. And throughout all of that, I didn't get a case of COVID until visting friends actually brought it into my house. Oh the irony.
Spotted the scam immediately. Refused vaccines, refused testing. Travelled by car and plane. Never got COVID, and don't know anyone that did. Questioned those that did if they had a bad flu like I did in 2000 and 2019. My mom was in the hospital for another issue when they said she tested positive for COVID. She was locked up in an isolation room, panicked. We took her home and she recovered. But she didn't ever have COVID. She would have died if we left her there.
We camped our way through Wyoming and South Dakota in the summer of 2020, and were grateful to be there. The amount of completely normal behavior was remarkable.
Chris, that "completely normal behavior" was, and is, VERY common in rural areas. The madness that afflicted inhabitants of our "urban shitholes' somehow failed to spread to the small communities, the farms and ranches of the heartland.
Same here. Masking, distancing, the rest of the crap was only ever a thing in the capital and some other cities, really.
On the other hand, public transport was "free" for over a year. The logic was thus:
If the passenger enters in the front and passes close by the driver, the driver may get Covid. So the two front rows of seats were cordoned off and you had to enter/exit in the middle.
Because a strip of black and yellow tape stops airborne viruses, right?
Clever little things - viruses. Not only can they obey the "thou shalt not pass" tape, the little buggers are apparently able to discern whether potential infectees are sitting or standing.
Don't know how many times I've pointed out such absurdities to medical personnel, incluing MDS, and been met with "maybe, but it makes me/them feel safer".
It's not hard for me to understand why certain globalists seems to view us as creatures or things, not humans.
It was strange to watch the news of what people were going through in other states. We felt grateful and sad at the same time. Our vicious winters notwithstanding I have no desire to live anywhere else.
Mar 24, 2023·edited Mar 24, 2023Liked by Chris Bray
Great follow up on your “politics of debilitation” piece.
What I see is this: Much of the laptop class overlaps with the woke pro-censorship “Speech is violence!” class. These latter, now millions of them, are people whose cultural politics is built upon the notion that certain identity groups (POC, LGBTQ+) are so utterly fragile that not only can one not criticize them, but one must constantly agree with their every claim or one approaches an act of “violence”, “erasure”, etc. And the key point for these woke laptop folks is that their *own* identity and status in society are based on holding firm to this woke philosophy of maintaining “verbal safety”. So that nothing is more anathema or inspires more horror in them than people who break their verbal codes—especially people who may feasibly throw around racial slurs or deny this or that Rainbow Article of Faith. Such people are the dirty Other who must be excluded to maintain “safety”.
Now look what happened with Covid. Suddenly we had an actual physical virus, not a verbal virus. But the very same economy of virtue-signaling safetyism arose in response. It arose among these laptop liberals all the more virulently because they noticed that the people most skeptical of official Covidism were largely the same people who’d long been skeptical of “speech codes” and “trigger warnings”. The same dirty Other, now eager to kill grandma to boot. With the result that the two kinds of safetyism melded into one: their mental approach to the Covid virus became *the same thing* as their mental approach to the “white-supremacist”, “free speech” verbal virus. The two kinds of pathogen, medical and verbal, came to occupy the same regions of their brain.
Of course we know that most Americans who support robust free speech are not a threat to POC or anyone else: they are not dangerous “white supremacists”. And we know Covid is no longer a threat. But the problem for our woke laptoppers is obvious: their very identity and status depend on maintaining the illusion of threat. If there is no real threat from that dirty Other—white, Trumpist, brazenly unmasked in line at the supermarket—their whole social being begins to crumble.
And so they’d rather willfully debilitate themselves than return to breathing oxygen in unmasked public places. Because to go unmasked in public is to admit that verbal slurs against trans people are OK. It’s to admit that white supremacy is OK. In their minds, all these threats are *the same thing*, and to give up any one of them is to risk the whole neurotic projection collapsing.
FYI, Chris. Response to your piece a few days back:
Excellent -- very well said. I've been thinking about the spit-flecked rage directed at John Ioannidis for arguing that the IFR wasn't that high. HOW DARE YOU SAY I'M NOT IN DANGER!
Mar 24, 2023·edited Mar 24, 2023Liked by Chris Bray
A perfect example. What does it mean that people get ANGRY upon learning they are not in danger? When does such a reaction make any sense? Answer: Only where the danger itself is a positive value. So we need to profile "danger" or "threat" as positive value, how it became a positive value.
I may be missing something, but I think in this political climate, it amounts in most cases to threat weaponized, a collective *cherishing* of threat because it allows the group to project/maintain their Other. "Your very presence here is causing HARM!" We hear this all the time from our crybullies, as recently at Stanford Law. Of course anyone who undermines their claims of “harm” likewise undermines their power to attack.
Thus Ioannidis is a threat, and thus the anger. He is eroding the threat that united the Covidians, and worse, he is providing evidence that the hated Others were maybe right not to support lockdown, vax mandates, etc. The medical has here become entirely political, and these people are so invested in their political identity that they would rather *continue a pandemic* than let it end.
So well said and I have been thinking something very similar for a few years now. I was deeply disturbed by the propaganda around social issues before the covid event.
I think the NPR listening laptop class and wannabes have been purposely primed for many years to fall into this current trap of virtue signaling themselves to death.
It’s frustrating and frightening to watch. I am grateful in some ways now for being raised in a working class family with street smarts and common sense, now not so common.
And really--think about it--street smarts is finally the most necessary *political* wisdom. It's the one intellectual tool that has a decent chance of protecting one from the subtler traps of ideology.
Well articulated! Yes neuroses will continue, until each and every one of us takes responsibility for our own health and removes fear from our brain . AKA throwing out the mainstream TV
Many, very many, of these "woke laptoppers" are paid agents and "influencers". There are entities spending billions to influence, divide and change culture. Driven by UN/WHO/WEF/UNESCO. This was in 2016. https://c-fam.org/friday_fax/unesco-promotes-lgbt-rights-children/
Even non Christians know this verse as one Jesus's most important messages.
Yet most forgot. That scripture alone covers all the bases for how The Church and Christians should've behaved. And if they had followed that verse and stood up we wouldn't be in this mess.
I guess all the Christians were waiting for "The Big One", as they muzzled their kids and shipped them off to school, while they got to stay home maskless.
Did any of these so called Christian parents think of their first responsibility: To protect their children!
Did The Church think about the least amongst us? For surely they will pay the biggest price. I could go on and on.
Pure selfishness which the Lord despises. And letting their pride get in the way of doing the right thing, because they didn't want to be seen as an outcast - or risk losing anything.
That is a great verse. I had many people share it will me during our darkest days up in Canada. As far as I know, certain denominations of Christians, held the strongest "imstitutional" lines against lockdowns, holding church services, without any 'outbreaks' and mounting millions of dollars in fines. They were an inspiration to the rest of the country.
Most did everywhere here too, but there were some that stood out like giants. And they got put through the ringer.
It was such a lifeline, much like seeing police cross the line for protestors, or Dr's prescribe early treatment , it broadcast hope when it was the most costly and necessary to do so.
Lately, their charges have been dropping like dominos. I suspect they don't want the constitutional challenges.
as someone who was forced into the laptop class after being depersoned and driven indoors by andrew cuomo in 2020, i can tell you that the "prolonged habit of fearful behavior, joylessness and sustained isolation, purposelessness, family disconnection, and so on" started years ago with the advent of the laptop class itself. kinda like the "warm base" that the DOD and pharma talk about in tabletop exercises and white papers. very useful in creating a baseline of hysteria on social media, and easier to kill off since their immune systems were already pretty wobbly by the time this shit went down
People couldn't wait to go home and stay there. It's like they never wanted to leave home in the first place. I'm mostly speaking of my co-workers here in Vermont. We had a 1,000 person office in 2019. Now only about 20 people "come in" to work, and I have to explain on every Team Call that yes, I'm in the ACTUAL OFFICE, and "Why?!?!" Because I don't want to work at home. "Oh, you're one of those OFFICE PEOPLE," said with the same tone people used to use with "vegetarians." Great. I'm now a weirdo who likes to wear real clothes and leave the house to talk to other humans in person, OMG!
Great point. We live on a farm and I already had the option to work remotely, which is nice when you live on a farm. Full lockdown didn't change our lives much except I was no longer traveling overseas. I have always liked going to the office, just not every day. Now I really want to go and the powers that be are closing the office and atomizing an already fragile workforce. I can see it making people go a bit crazier all the time. I go in whenever I know others will be there, just for the interaction and building those workplace relationships that are actually very very important for good decisions and getting things done.
Building local family and community relationships for the coming (already here!) hard times. Literally counting the days until retirement.
I'd love to have a farm even though it's a lot of work. I'd probably just quit alltogether and go back to subsistence living. There's a few of us who go in to work and we all say the same thing, "I hated work at home," and people get that look in their eyes like that says, "I won't go back," liking people back from a war. The office, overall, is much better with just the 5 or 6 of there who like people and want to be there. Truth is a lot of people who used to be there hated everyone and complained all the time about noise! smells! laughter!, people!, etc. lol.
I'm amazed at how much happier I got just having a place to go and saying, "Hi!" to a few people everyday, and having a normal little chit chat with the janitor or security guard or whomever. It turns out all those little, "Have a nice days!" and "Good to see yous!" and "Take it easys!" add up to a much better mental health overall.
I realized the other day that as an introvert, what I like about being back in the office is the ability to interact with people without having to make a great effort to do so. Extroverts will go to the trouble of making arrangements to meet up with people whatever the situation, but if my job were fully remote, I’d have virtually no in-person interaction because I wouldn’t be able to get over the activation energy barrier necessary to make it happen.
That's a great point. I'm kind of in the middle, intra/extra, but not much of a social instigator. So I appreciate office-casual interaction for the reasons you mention, too! Younger colleagues seem most at risk of social distortion and future challenges as I look across our teams: I see a number of 'kids' (to me, they are) who need to build professional skills and communication habits that they simply have no possibility of learning as part of this kind of workforce.
There's so much to write about the total craziness of our "elites", who are trying to destroy the next generation as well as themselves, but you really nailed this Chris. Things nobody is saying, but normal people are starting to notice. Thanks for thinking this through and sharing it with us.
It was painful to wake up to the genocide, but now I can't imagine how the cretins don't see it. Denial reinforced with propaganda. Great essay, Chris.
Genocide, corruption, mendacity. Imagine a world where we had a functioning media. It requires a vivid imagination. Thank goodness for Substack, Rumble, and Musk.
I was told by someone yesterday that Canada has had a banner year for population growth b/c of all all the immigrants, and that we have a housing shortage. Although the immigration thing with Ukraine and Pakistan may be true....people have forgotten to consider the youth and residents that live here. Incredible willful ignorance.
They haven't forgotten about the people who live in the debt based ponzi scheme we call crony capitalism. They're just not cared about, lots of natives have realized most of what they're told is lies. And their lives have been getting worse for a few decades now. Better to bring in people with base exceptions and no debt so keep the ponzi going ;)
it's just too bad that they're taking people with them by shedding....why we must be more healthy than ever before, physically mentally and spiritually.
Good explanation for why society seems to be losing it's mind. Everyone getting covid seems to have revealed it was all for nothing but the truth is these people liked the restrictions and it allowed them to virtue signal their self righteousness. In their minds it wasn't truckers and farmers and delivery people that got them through the pandemic, it was them and the rules they followed.
“chronic suicide” -- K Vonnegut used to say he was “committing suicide by cigarette.” The point being that we habituate ourselves to industrial life by addiction to incremental poisons, dispensed in shrink-wrapped government-approved corporate doses
And now Slaughterhouse Five -- that is, industrial-scale mass murder -- is worldwide and this time the enemy targets civilians as well as soldiers obviously.
Of course the Allies’ firebombing of Dresden was also a precedent for “friendly fire” on our own American prisoners of war (e.g. Vonnegut) on the ground.
You could say in that case we made a military calculation that indiscriminate firepower’s benefits outweigh the risks to ourselves.
I can easily imagine that KV, if somehow he could see us now, would breathe a sigh of relief and affirm that he exited the planet just in time to avoid Dresden 2.0 ...
Chronic suicide - I’m going to be thinking about that. It is so bizarre that people increasingly slip themselves into an ascetic and sanitized life and feel virtuous about it. Even art is becoming more and more ugly. Young people seem miserable. If you’re not miserable, there must be something wrong with you - call the gender butchers! Or the social justice warriors to give you a cause to stress about! *sigh*
Perhaps you should know about Pantry Porn, and be wary of committing it, lest you display your racist, sexist, and every other-ist against our poor beleaguered by oppression population that is not white.
I saw a reference yesterday how some Loons believe having a neat, clean and well-laid out food pantry in your home is white supremacy. I’m not sure why having disorderly and dirty storage sites advance the cause of non-Whites, though.
Since I, too, like to keep my closets and cupboards orderly and easy to find things in, they think I’m a Racist?
That's exactly what I was referring to. If you want to enjoy a droll take on this idiocy, Bill Whittle's Right Angle show on You Tube "Pantry Shaming" will be covering it today
Haha! No one would accuse me of pantry porn. My books are pretty well organized, but my pantry and kitchen shelves look like they were organized by a blind person. I blame special needs parenting. 😂
"Atrophy" is a very apt concept with which to describe the laptop class, and not only as regards their musculature and immune systems. Their social skills, their discernment, their ability to perceive reality, their memories ... everything about them is degenerating.
Life requires hormesis, a degree of resistance and challenge. Without this it withers. Too much "safety" and life withers.
Perhaps their spirits intuit this, that the lives they are trapped in are deeply toxic. Seeing no way out, they elect for slow suicide. Having a degree of influence in society, they project this death wish outward - hence the enthusiasm for the sterilization of children, abortion, euthanasia, safe injection sites, and all the rest. They don't just wish to end their own lives, but to end it all. They rarely admit this, but if you corner them you can frequently get them to admit that they believe the world would be better off without humans.
Working every day in a full service medical office (adult, pediatrics, dental, and mental health services) as a provider I can tell you that you are 100% right on this- our mental health population has exploded- in all age groups. I suspect the next issue will be mental health worker burn-out. What a disaster was created.
Mar 24, 2023·edited Mar 24, 2023Liked by Chris Bray
Psychiatrist friend of my wife pointed this out 25 (?) years ago:
"The frequency of mental disorders, diagnoses and prescriptions is higher today among the under-40s than among Holocaust survivors".
Can't testify to the actual veracity, but I did get his point. We aren't getting sicker: we are getting 'softer'.
Wife's paternal grandmother was from way up north, above the Arctic Circle. She told about how they handled people dying during winter (at least half the year) when the ground is hard as steel. Put the deceased in a casket, buried it in the snow close to the house and marked the place with spruce-branches.
She had to walk to and from school seeing those branches marking where her dead sister waited for Spring. She weren't traumatised; she was sad and dealt with it.
I’ve been doing this for 47 years and don’t know what being burned out means. I work with a good team of medical professionals and we support each other. Plus- we are not home sitting behind a computer and a mask- we are are out there trying to help. It’s all good.
Like so many things, almost all of this springs from the well of the Feminization of Western Culture. The twitter photo is a perfect example of this (problem glasses, dyed hair, bizarre narrative). Yes, there are men like this too (feminized or gay), but the majority of this comes from women's need for "safety" and drama. The perfect match.
The most frequent command in the Bible is do not be afraid.
And most churches closed.
Separating the wheat from the chaff.
Gotta tell you most Christians forgot that Jesus did not want us to live (or succumb) in a spirit of fear.
The Church gets a big fail.
Separating the wheat from the chaff.
Sure, but who wants to hang out with chaff?
Every angel has the same advice: "Fear not"
Usually because the people they are talking to are trembling and sore afraid. When engaged in an angelic or holy interaction, try to be like Samuel was, because it's hard to process new information whilst shitting one's pants.
Stated 365 times
Great point!
I never quite thought of it from that perspective. As a retired person the pandemic lockdowns didn't impact my income or my working situation, obviously. I did, however, rail at the lockdowns and took every opportunity I could find to get out and defy what the ruling class was telling me to do. Maybe it was the rebel in me, or maybe it was just the common sense of having been around for six plus decades. And throughout all of that, I didn't get a case of COVID until visting friends actually brought it into my house. Oh the irony.
Spotted the scam immediately. Refused vaccines, refused testing. Travelled by car and plane. Never got COVID, and don't know anyone that did. Questioned those that did if they had a bad flu like I did in 2000 and 2019. My mom was in the hospital for another issue when they said she tested positive for COVID. She was locked up in an isolation room, panicked. We took her home and she recovered. But she didn't ever have COVID. She would have died if we left her there.
Smart lady. It was flu. Colds and flu were cancelled globally to make way for covid.
Same here! It was easy to ignore the “pandemic” in South Dakota. And I acquired Covid from a visiting relative.
We camped our way through Wyoming and South Dakota in the summer of 2020, and were grateful to be there. The amount of completely normal behavior was remarkable.
Chris, that "completely normal behavior" was, and is, VERY common in rural areas. The madness that afflicted inhabitants of our "urban shitholes' somehow failed to spread to the small communities, the farms and ranches of the heartland.
Same here. Masking, distancing, the rest of the crap was only ever a thing in the capital and some other cities, really.
On the other hand, public transport was "free" for over a year. The logic was thus:
If the passenger enters in the front and passes close by the driver, the driver may get Covid. So the two front rows of seats were cordoned off and you had to enter/exit in the middle.
Because a strip of black and yellow tape stops airborne viruses, right?
Clever little things - viruses. Not only can they obey the "thou shalt not pass" tape, the little buggers are apparently able to discern whether potential infectees are sitting or standing.
Yeah.
Don't know how many times I've pointed out such absurdities to medical personnel, incluing MDS, and been met with "maybe, but it makes me/them feel safer".
It's not hard for me to understand why certain globalists seems to view us as creatures or things, not humans.
It was strange to watch the news of what people were going through in other states. We felt grateful and sad at the same time. Our vicious winters notwithstanding I have no desire to live anywhere else.
Great follow up on your “politics of debilitation” piece.
What I see is this: Much of the laptop class overlaps with the woke pro-censorship “Speech is violence!” class. These latter, now millions of them, are people whose cultural politics is built upon the notion that certain identity groups (POC, LGBTQ+) are so utterly fragile that not only can one not criticize them, but one must constantly agree with their every claim or one approaches an act of “violence”, “erasure”, etc. And the key point for these woke laptop folks is that their *own* identity and status in society are based on holding firm to this woke philosophy of maintaining “verbal safety”. So that nothing is more anathema or inspires more horror in them than people who break their verbal codes—especially people who may feasibly throw around racial slurs or deny this or that Rainbow Article of Faith. Such people are the dirty Other who must be excluded to maintain “safety”.
Now look what happened with Covid. Suddenly we had an actual physical virus, not a verbal virus. But the very same economy of virtue-signaling safetyism arose in response. It arose among these laptop liberals all the more virulently because they noticed that the people most skeptical of official Covidism were largely the same people who’d long been skeptical of “speech codes” and “trigger warnings”. The same dirty Other, now eager to kill grandma to boot. With the result that the two kinds of safetyism melded into one: their mental approach to the Covid virus became *the same thing* as their mental approach to the “white-supremacist”, “free speech” verbal virus. The two kinds of pathogen, medical and verbal, came to occupy the same regions of their brain.
Of course we know that most Americans who support robust free speech are not a threat to POC or anyone else: they are not dangerous “white supremacists”. And we know Covid is no longer a threat. But the problem for our woke laptoppers is obvious: their very identity and status depend on maintaining the illusion of threat. If there is no real threat from that dirty Other—white, Trumpist, brazenly unmasked in line at the supermarket—their whole social being begins to crumble.
And so they’d rather willfully debilitate themselves than return to breathing oxygen in unmasked public places. Because to go unmasked in public is to admit that verbal slurs against trans people are OK. It’s to admit that white supremacy is OK. In their minds, all these threats are *the same thing*, and to give up any one of them is to risk the whole neurotic projection collapsing.
FYI, Chris. Response to your piece a few days back:
https://claytestament.blogspot.com/2023/03/entrenched-clown-syndrome-real-pandemic_23.html
Excellent -- very well said. I've been thinking about the spit-flecked rage directed at John Ioannidis for arguing that the IFR wasn't that high. HOW DARE YOU SAY I'M NOT IN DANGER!
A perfect example. What does it mean that people get ANGRY upon learning they are not in danger? When does such a reaction make any sense? Answer: Only where the danger itself is a positive value. So we need to profile "danger" or "threat" as positive value, how it became a positive value.
I may be missing something, but I think in this political climate, it amounts in most cases to threat weaponized, a collective *cherishing* of threat because it allows the group to project/maintain their Other. "Your very presence here is causing HARM!" We hear this all the time from our crybullies, as recently at Stanford Law. Of course anyone who undermines their claims of “harm” likewise undermines their power to attack.
Thus Ioannidis is a threat, and thus the anger. He is eroding the threat that united the Covidians, and worse, he is providing evidence that the hated Others were maybe right not to support lockdown, vax mandates, etc. The medical has here become entirely political, and these people are so invested in their political identity that they would rather *continue a pandemic* than let it end.
So well said and I have been thinking something very similar for a few years now. I was deeply disturbed by the propaganda around social issues before the covid event.
I think the NPR listening laptop class and wannabes have been purposely primed for many years to fall into this current trap of virtue signaling themselves to death.
It’s frustrating and frightening to watch. I am grateful in some ways now for being raised in a working class family with street smarts and common sense, now not so common.
Street smarts be praised!
And really--think about it--street smarts is finally the most necessary *political* wisdom. It's the one intellectual tool that has a decent chance of protecting one from the subtler traps of ideology.
Well articulated! Yes neuroses will continue, until each and every one of us takes responsibility for our own health and removes fear from our brain . AKA throwing out the mainstream TV
If you hear a funny sound, it's me clapping at Mach 1. So well explained!
Without the constipated verbiage of the academic-class (from which I'm a refugee).
Great stuff!
Many, very many, of these "woke laptoppers" are paid agents and "influencers". There are entities spending billions to influence, divide and change culture. Driven by UN/WHO/WEF/UNESCO. This was in 2016. https://c-fam.org/friday_fax/unesco-promotes-lgbt-rights-children/
Awesome article. And great question: " Try to mock these people and you sound exactly like them. What does that tell you?" lol.
Bingo!
2 Timothy 1:7
New King James Version
7 For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.
Even non Christians know this verse as one Jesus's most important messages.
Yet most forgot. That scripture alone covers all the bases for how The Church and Christians should've behaved. And if they had followed that verse and stood up we wouldn't be in this mess.
I guess all the Christians were waiting for "The Big One", as they muzzled their kids and shipped them off to school, while they got to stay home maskless.
Did any of these so called Christian parents think of their first responsibility: To protect their children!
Did The Church think about the least amongst us? For surely they will pay the biggest price. I could go on and on.
Pure selfishness which the Lord despises. And letting their pride get in the way of doing the right thing, because they didn't want to be seen as an outcast - or risk losing anything.
We know what the scripture says about pride...
That is a great verse. I had many people share it will me during our darkest days up in Canada. As far as I know, certain denominations of Christians, held the strongest "imstitutional" lines against lockdowns, holding church services, without any 'outbreaks' and mounting millions of dollars in fines. They were an inspiration to the rest of the country.
Not in America. They folded like lawn chairs
Most did everywhere here too, but there were some that stood out like giants. And they got put through the ringer.
It was such a lifeline, much like seeing police cross the line for protestors, or Dr's prescribe early treatment , it broadcast hope when it was the most costly and necessary to do so.
Lately, their charges have been dropping like dominos. I suspect they don't want the constitutional challenges.
https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/windsor-pastor-pleasantly-surprised-after-crown-drops-anti-lockdown-charges
https://www.bowenislandundercurrent.com/health/court-dismisses-case-against-nb-pastor-for-holding-services-during-covid-lockdown-6500037
https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/calgary-preacher-s-public-gathering-violation-conviction-set-aside-fine-reimbursed-1.5998639
I agree. As an American I had never been so proud of anything in my life when the Truckers came together to fight for freedom.
It gives me goosebumps to think about it as I write this.
The Eloi disappeared to their underground bunkers and binge-watched TV and snarked on twitter while the Morlocks did all the work.
One day the Morlocks will notice this.
Oh they noticed. But they have few options except refusing to work.
as someone who was forced into the laptop class after being depersoned and driven indoors by andrew cuomo in 2020, i can tell you that the "prolonged habit of fearful behavior, joylessness and sustained isolation, purposelessness, family disconnection, and so on" started years ago with the advent of the laptop class itself. kinda like the "warm base" that the DOD and pharma talk about in tabletop exercises and white papers. very useful in creating a baseline of hysteria on social media, and easier to kill off since their immune systems were already pretty wobbly by the time this shit went down
People couldn't wait to go home and stay there. It's like they never wanted to leave home in the first place. I'm mostly speaking of my co-workers here in Vermont. We had a 1,000 person office in 2019. Now only about 20 people "come in" to work, and I have to explain on every Team Call that yes, I'm in the ACTUAL OFFICE, and "Why?!?!" Because I don't want to work at home. "Oh, you're one of those OFFICE PEOPLE," said with the same tone people used to use with "vegetarians." Great. I'm now a weirdo who likes to wear real clothes and leave the house to talk to other humans in person, OMG!
Great point. We live on a farm and I already had the option to work remotely, which is nice when you live on a farm. Full lockdown didn't change our lives much except I was no longer traveling overseas. I have always liked going to the office, just not every day. Now I really want to go and the powers that be are closing the office and atomizing an already fragile workforce. I can see it making people go a bit crazier all the time. I go in whenever I know others will be there, just for the interaction and building those workplace relationships that are actually very very important for good decisions and getting things done.
Building local family and community relationships for the coming (already here!) hard times. Literally counting the days until retirement.
I'd love to have a farm even though it's a lot of work. I'd probably just quit alltogether and go back to subsistence living. There's a few of us who go in to work and we all say the same thing, "I hated work at home," and people get that look in their eyes like that says, "I won't go back," liking people back from a war. The office, overall, is much better with just the 5 or 6 of there who like people and want to be there. Truth is a lot of people who used to be there hated everyone and complained all the time about noise! smells! laughter!, people!, etc. lol.
I'm amazed at how much happier I got just having a place to go and saying, "Hi!" to a few people everyday, and having a normal little chit chat with the janitor or security guard or whomever. It turns out all those little, "Have a nice days!" and "Good to see yous!" and "Take it easys!" add up to a much better mental health overall.
I realized the other day that as an introvert, what I like about being back in the office is the ability to interact with people without having to make a great effort to do so. Extroverts will go to the trouble of making arrangements to meet up with people whatever the situation, but if my job were fully remote, I’d have virtually no in-person interaction because I wouldn’t be able to get over the activation energy barrier necessary to make it happen.
That's a great point. I'm kind of in the middle, intra/extra, but not much of a social instigator. So I appreciate office-casual interaction for the reasons you mention, too! Younger colleagues seem most at risk of social distortion and future challenges as I look across our teams: I see a number of 'kids' (to me, they are) who need to build professional skills and communication habits that they simply have no possibility of learning as part of this kind of workforce.
‘It is not good for man to be alone.” Our idol pf total independence is an illusion.
…of…. sheesh,
Look for the three dots to the right of "reply." You can edit comments! So yiu cen corect typoevs.
Thats funny. And sad. And a good snapshot of what we're up against, it is one more step in the infantilization of our culture.
There's so much to write about the total craziness of our "elites", who are trying to destroy the next generation as well as themselves, but you really nailed this Chris. Things nobody is saying, but normal people are starting to notice. Thanks for thinking this through and sharing it with us.
It was painful to wake up to the genocide, but now I can't imagine how the cretins don't see it. Denial reinforced with propaganda. Great essay, Chris.
Genocide, corruption, mendacity. Imagine a world where we had a functioning media. It requires a vivid imagination. Thank goodness for Substack, Rumble, and Musk.
I was told by someone yesterday that Canada has had a banner year for population growth b/c of all all the immigrants, and that we have a housing shortage. Although the immigration thing with Ukraine and Pakistan may be true....people have forgotten to consider the youth and residents that live here. Incredible willful ignorance.
Canada blows.
That's my productive comment of the day.
at least you're being real
They haven't forgotten about the people who live in the debt based ponzi scheme we call crony capitalism. They're just not cared about, lots of natives have realized most of what they're told is lies. And their lives have been getting worse for a few decades now. Better to bring in people with base exceptions and no debt so keep the ponzi going ;)
Or refuse to take the leap. It's a dark, and cold and lonely swim away from the comforts of the institutions.
Love how say freedom outcompetes any other idea...it's the basis for all other ideas, so can never be beat.!
And, of course, these unintelligentsia are quite literally committing suicide, jab by jab, with their endless parade of DEATHVAX™ injections.
it's just too bad that they're taking people with them by shedding....why we must be more healthy than ever before, physically mentally and spiritually.
What do you do the remediate from the shedding (transmission) of the clot shot’s contents?
Good explanation for why society seems to be losing it's mind. Everyone getting covid seems to have revealed it was all for nothing but the truth is these people liked the restrictions and it allowed them to virtue signal their self righteousness. In their minds it wasn't truckers and farmers and delivery people that got them through the pandemic, it was them and the rules they followed.
“chronic suicide” -- K Vonnegut used to say he was “committing suicide by cigarette.” The point being that we habituate ourselves to industrial life by addiction to incremental poisons, dispensed in shrink-wrapped government-approved corporate doses
Yes to "industrial life." Exactly what it is.
And now Slaughterhouse Five -- that is, industrial-scale mass murder -- is worldwide and this time the enemy targets civilians as well as soldiers obviously.
Of course the Allies’ firebombing of Dresden was also a precedent for “friendly fire” on our own American prisoners of war (e.g. Vonnegut) on the ground.
You could say in that case we made a military calculation that indiscriminate firepower’s benefits outweigh the risks to ourselves.
I can easily imagine that KV, if somehow he could see us now, would breathe a sigh of relief and affirm that he exited the planet just in time to avoid Dresden 2.0 ...
If you haven't watched the Fog of War with Robert McNamara i'd suggest you do. No matter your thoughts on him, its a very illuminating documentary.
Suicide by the installment plan
Chronic suicide - I’m going to be thinking about that. It is so bizarre that people increasingly slip themselves into an ascetic and sanitized life and feel virtuous about it. Even art is becoming more and more ugly. Young people seem miserable. If you’re not miserable, there must be something wrong with you - call the gender butchers! Or the social justice warriors to give you a cause to stress about! *sigh*
Perhaps you should know about Pantry Porn, and be wary of committing it, lest you display your racist, sexist, and every other-ist against our poor beleaguered by oppression population that is not white.
I saw a reference yesterday how some Loons believe having a neat, clean and well-laid out food pantry in your home is white supremacy. I’m not sure why having disorderly and dirty storage sites advance the cause of non-Whites, though.
Since I, too, like to keep my closets and cupboards orderly and easy to find things in, they think I’m a Racist?
As Judge Judy would say, “YOU’RE A MORON!”
That's exactly what I was referring to. If you want to enjoy a droll take on this idiocy, Bill Whittle's Right Angle show on You Tube "Pantry Shaming" will be covering it today
Haha! No one would accuse me of pantry porn. My books are pretty well organized, but my pantry and kitchen shelves look like they were organized by a blind person. I blame special needs parenting. 😂
Oh, same here - my house looks tidy and organized but under the surface and behind closed doors 😳
Good insight on the art. In a way, true art resembles reality, so maybe they'll be a masterpiece ha. I thought campbell soup by warhol was bad.
"Atrophy" is a very apt concept with which to describe the laptop class, and not only as regards their musculature and immune systems. Their social skills, their discernment, their ability to perceive reality, their memories ... everything about them is degenerating.
Life requires hormesis, a degree of resistance and challenge. Without this it withers. Too much "safety" and life withers.
Perhaps their spirits intuit this, that the lives they are trapped in are deeply toxic. Seeing no way out, they elect for slow suicide. Having a degree of influence in society, they project this death wish outward - hence the enthusiasm for the sterilization of children, abortion, euthanasia, safe injection sites, and all the rest. They don't just wish to end their own lives, but to end it all. They rarely admit this, but if you corner them you can frequently get them to admit that they believe the world would be better off without humans.
I almost included a discussion in this post about PD Mangan's argument regarding hormesis.
https://twitter.com/mangan150/status/1395171034328883201
He's constantly encouraging people to be uncomfortable for a bit, and he's not wrong.
I think that's quite possibly the most important advice for anyone living in modern society.
Adversity builds character.
Creature comforts creates comfortable creatures.
As in "terminal complacency".
"THEY believe the world would be better off without humans".
I believe the world would be better off without THOSE particular humans.
So true. Death becomes their most trusted friend.
Working every day in a full service medical office (adult, pediatrics, dental, and mental health services) as a provider I can tell you that you are 100% right on this- our mental health population has exploded- in all age groups. I suspect the next issue will be mental health worker burn-out. What a disaster was created.
Psychiatrist friend of my wife pointed this out 25 (?) years ago:
"The frequency of mental disorders, diagnoses and prescriptions is higher today among the under-40s than among Holocaust survivors".
Can't testify to the actual veracity, but I did get his point. We aren't getting sicker: we are getting 'softer'.
Wife's paternal grandmother was from way up north, above the Arctic Circle. She told about how they handled people dying during winter (at least half the year) when the ground is hard as steel. Put the deceased in a casket, buried it in the snow close to the house and marked the place with spruce-branches.
She had to walk to and from school seeing those branches marking where her dead sister waited for Spring. She weren't traumatised; she was sad and dealt with it.
Today's westerner under age 50 or so?
Very insightful. Are you seeing this burnout already in a lot of your coworkers? Are they "wired and tired"...or just depressed? Thanks, Roman
I’ve been doing this for 47 years and don’t know what being burned out means. I work with a good team of medical professionals and we support each other. Plus- we are not home sitting behind a computer and a mask- we are are out there trying to help. It’s all good.
Like so many things, almost all of this springs from the well of the Feminization of Western Culture. The twitter photo is a perfect example of this (problem glasses, dyed hair, bizarre narrative). Yes, there are men like this too (feminized or gay), but the majority of this comes from women's need for "safety" and drama. The perfect match.
And a good number women who aren't like this, but in general....
I noticed very early on that it was specifically middle-aged middle class white women driving the Project Fear narrative.
Not all of us!
#notallwhitewomen 😄